In the course of increasing international competition in virtually all branches of the economy, the degree of automation of technical systems is becoming more and more significant as such automation can have a favorable effect not only on the reliability and quality of a wide variety of process engineering processes, but also on the implementation costs thereof.
This leads to increasingly heavy use of electronic data processing systems whose hardware and software components are subjected to an innovation cycle which is becoming ever shorter. Furthermore, there is a tendency to replace electronic data processing systems which were previously specially designed for specific process engineering functions by standard components, for example personal computers, which are widespread and can be obtained through the relevant specialist retail outlets.
In the course of the modernization of, for example, a process control system of a technical system, there is an increasing problem of porting the software which is installed on the process control system and matched to its special requirements to a modernized electronic data processing system which makes other requirements of the running capability of the software.
Here, there are in particular difficulties if an outdated component which is near to the processes is replaced with a new component which is not compatible with it. The software programs which run on this outdated component generally have to be completely newly created, which requires considerable expenditure.
In order to overcome this problem, it is known to create application programs in what is referred to as a “pseudo-code” which is modeled on the structure of a computer program but does not include the specific hardware and software requirements of a specific target platform. This pseudo-code thus describes in a general form which is close to software in a technical function which is to be processed by a software program, and which may be used as a basis for the creation of corresponding software programs for selected target platforms.
It is disadvantageous here that, owing to the representation of the technical solution to the problem in a way which is near to the software, the overview for the projecting engineer is highly restricted. Furthermore, when such pseudo-codes are ported to a specific target platform, it is usually still necessary to carry out numerous modifications in order to obtain a program code which is capable of running on the target platform. As a result, the degree of re-usability of this pseudo-code is highly restricted.